The use and abuse of anti-imperialist rhetoric as a mechanism for consolidating authoritarian control over society was the most valuable lesson Chavez learned from Fidel. A superheated brand of unthinking anti-Americanism became the all-purpose excuse for any and every authoritarian excess, stigmatising any form of protest and casting a dark pall over any expression of discontent or dissent. The technique's infinite versatility proved its central attraction: You could blame shadowy gringo infiltrator for neighbourhood protests over chronic power shortages just as easily as you could silence whistleblowers of government corruption by casting them as CIA fifth columns.
In Cuba, considering the island's history as a target for American imperialist meddling, anti-imperialism - however wantonly abused - rested on a bed of historic verisimilitude. But in Venezuela, a country with no history of direct American imperial aggression, this borrowed bit of rhetorical posturing served only to underline chavismo's derivative status, its ideology a kind of fidelista hand-me-down lacking even the self-awareness to realise it was decades out of date by the time it was born.
Where Chavez was able to transcend the Cuban model, it was largely due to the advantages of life at the receiving end of an unprecedented petrodollar flood. By some estimates, Venezuela sold over $1 trillion worth of oil during his tenure, and so his was government by hyperconsumption, not rationing. The petroboom allowed Chavez to substitute the chequebook for the gulag; marginalising his opponents via popular spending programs rather than rounding them up and throwing them in jail. Rather than declaring all-out war on business, he co-opted them. Rather than abolish civil society, he created a parallel civil society, complete with pro-government unions, universities, radio stations and community councils. Such enhancements were tried before by left-wing populists in Latin America, but always failed because they ran out of money.
Chavez avoided this pitfall thanks to the greatest of his innovations: He consciously avoided a complete break with the US of the kind that Castro provoked in 1960. Instead, he railed against gringo imperialism all morning, then spent all afternoon selling those same gringos oil. The irony is that this, his most important innovation, will be the one least memorialised by his admirers. It was a gloriously incoherent posture, but one that fit the square peg of revolutionary zeal into the round hole of an import-led petropopulism.
Ironically, though, in its dependence on oil rents, the Chavez model quietly undermined its own claim to represent a new alternative to dreaded Washington-sponsored neoliberalism. After all, if Venezuela could afford to botch the nationalisation of its own steel industry, it was because there were always petrodollars around to import the steel that local industry was no longer producing. And if nationalisations up and down the agro-food chain resulted in food shortages, money could always be found to import the balance. As the Venezuelan State-Owned Enterprise sector grew, it looked more and more like the USSR's - with a single profit-generating industry cross-subsidising a bewildering array of loss-making concerns. Chavenomics, as a development model, boiled down to little beyond extracting oil, selling it at high prices, and using the proceeds to paper over the rest of the system's cracks. How such a model is supposed to be relevant to countries that don't happen to float on top of hundreds of billions of barrels in oil reserves is anybody's guess.
Still and all, petropopulism's attractions were all too clear for Chavez. Those deep, oil-lined pockets allowed Chavez a luxury Fidel could only dream of: being able to hold a long string of not-overtly-rigged elections without ever seriously endangering his grip on power. It used to be that you could have either unchecked personal power or electoral legitimacy, but the petrodollar flood allowed Chavez to have both.
Elected autocracy may sound like an oxymoron, but this is exactly what the Venezuelan synthesis of the Cuban experience yielded: a system that washed away the sins of its own aggressive contempt for dissidence and dissent through continual recourse to the ballot box. What Hugo Chavez built was, in other words, a flawless autocracy.
